In environments like data centers, lots of homogeneous or heterogeneous devices are connected to one another. Those devices are often physically connected by cables. Connection information of the cables is important in many scenarios. For example, the connection information may be used to debug a configuration fault or plan a configuration change. A data center usually includes a great number of cables which can be arranged over the ceiling or under the floor tiles and are sometimes bundled together. As a result, the connection information of cables is hard to be maintained and verified.
Nowadays many data centers include low-level switching devices, such as Layer 1 (L1) switches, connected between servers, high-level switches and storage systems for test automation and connection management. Such low-level switching devices are often simple pass-through devices that do not care about the targets for connections and have no capability to detect any information about the targets. Therefore, information about the connections through the low-level switching devices cannot be detected unless using extra resources (cables or devices) or modifying existing cable connections.